By Pepper Fisher

PORT ANGELES – Recycling is in the news this week with the City Council being asked by City staff to approve a cost-saving change to the cardboard recycling program, as well as an extension of a yard waste agreement.

Until now, the City has been shipping cardboard recycling to Seattle at a cost of about $225,000 per year, or $2,300 per load. The City collects a rebate of $87 per ton of cardboard delivered, but there’s still net loss of around $1,600 per load.

Now, Director of Public Works Mike Healy has worked out an agreement with McKinley Paper to recycle all of our cardboard right here in Port Angeles at a huge savings.

“What we’re doing is, we’re cutting our transportation costs tremendously. It’ll probably save somewhere in the neighborhood of to $250,000 in transport costs to take it to McKinley, where it can foster more jobs here and be used locally again in an environmentally sound way without us also putting all that carbon associated with truck trips to the Seattle area, which is our nearest cardboard recycling center.”

The contract says McKinley must use the cardboard for environmentally sound recycling purposes. This is a five-year contract with reporting requirements. Healey says City staff will be required to sort the cardboard before McKinley takes it.

The City Council is also being asked to approve some extra funding for the yard waste contract the City has with Brady Trucking. When the City took over the operations of the transfer station in 2022, the compost facility was not operational. It still isn’t, causing the stockpile of branches and other debris to be constantly piling up.

Brady hauls our yard waste to a compost facility in Shelton. The contract pays Brady Trucking $270,000 per year, but the cost to transport and handle the materials has gone up, so additional funds are needed to get through the rest of 2024 to the tune of $170,000.

Healy says he’s taking a hard look at whether it makes sense for the City to resume making its own compost, but he says the cost benefit analysis on that is complex.

“If it’s something that will at least break even, we’ll probably do it again. But I don’t want to use, quite honestly, City funds, or government funds, to artificially compete against the private sector. So, we’ve never had the grinders and the like, so it’s always been rental for that process as well, to break down the woody materials and the like. So, you know, we encourage yard waste at the facility. We still take it, we still process it, only we send it off to a manufacturer that actually makes compost and has all the equipment to deal with it.”

Healy says the extra funds in the amount of $170,000 are available in the approved 2024 Solid Waste Professional Services budget.

As for glass recycling, which the City of Port Angeles initiated last year at both transfer stations, Healy says the participation in that program is not yet at the level they’d hoped. Still, he says he and other City officials believe that glass recycling is the right thing to do, and he thinks more people will bring their glass to the drop-off points as the word continues to spread.

If you’d like to learn more about making your own compost at home, download Clallam County’s Composting Basics information sheet.